There's No Escape From Death
by AngelOfBlackBlood
Summary: No One Can Escape From Death


**Authors Note- Written for round four of Quidditch. It had to start and end with a pronoun. I do not own Harry Potter **

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It wasn't fair. But then again, it's almost impossible to find anything truly fair these days. Everyday, all over the world, people die. They take their last stuttering breaths and then they cease to exist. Everything that made that person who they were just disappears and all that's left behind is a gaping hole that emits waves of destructive depression, threatening to drown anyone standing too close.

I see these drowning people nearly everyday. I watch as the concrete walls built around their emotions begin to crumble, and I watch the cracks begin to swirl across the once hard stone creating what could only be described as a jagged spider's web.

Eventually the walls fall completely, eroded away like an old cliff face. People are stripped bare and their emotions are left exposed to battle the elements. The idea is that time heals and allows the walls to be built back up, but in my opinion, it does the opposite. Time allows people to think, allows people to remember. They dwell on what was, on what could have been and they never move on, not truly. The walls that have been rebuilt always have small imperfections and all it takes is one tiny shove to bring it all crumbling down again.

That was the problem with this job. Depression and desperation were both permanent components of the air upon which we relied on so heavily. But there is a definite difference between seeing the crumbling walls of a stranger to that of seeing the cracked walls of people you had gone to school with, people you had never thought of seeing again.

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_**Potter.**_ I hadn't seen or heard that name in a long time. But there it was, printed in bold near the top of the folder I was now carefully studying. _Harry Potter_, the boy who turned away my friendship and hated me for years. _Harry Potter,_ the boy who lived and defeated the Dark Lord, was here at the hospital, dying.

He had been hit with a rogue curse while on some sort of mission for the ministry and now he was in room 152 with healers trying to find a way to save him, and so far, failing to do so.

I had been handed the document by my boss half an hour ago. The look on her face telling me all I needed to know about the chances of him surviving this. I had then made my way to one of the small office areas where I could read the file in peace and, hopefully, find a way to help him.

But at the moment it didn't look good.

My next job was to visit the patient himself and to try and deduce what could be done. Just getting into the room was hard enough. Security stood outside his door, creating a barrier of flesh between the reporters and _him_. It took a while to convince them to step aside and allow me entrance; apparently they had had several people pretending to be healers already.

Upon entry, the severity of this case became evident. All the veins on the right side of his face were deep shades of purple and blue, they cut across his pale skin like tree branches reaching for his mouth, like tree branches reaching out to suffocate him.

His eyes were unfocused and remained staring upwards even when I moved closer. The rise and fall of his chest was uneven and each breath rattled in his throat. I had never seen anything like it before.

I began searching through my memory bank for any information on curses that could cause such strange symptoms, but I couldn't find anything. As I continued to stare at his striped face, I let my mind wonder and I found myself thinking of all the times in school where our personalities had clashed.

I remembered the fights on the Quidditch pitch and I remembered the searing pain as he flung curses at me in the school bathrooms, and it was in that moment that I realised something. I had never hated him; I had merely hated myself for not being like him.

I must have stood there for quite a while because eventually he became aware of my presence, and even now I can recall all the details of how he had turned to me with pain filled eyes that practically begged for some kind of release.

His eyes became clearer as he recognised who I was and then he stared in disbelief that I could only imagine came from seeing me in a healers uniform, standing by the side of his death bed. I stood there waiting for his disbelief to turn into disgust or horror, after all, I had run away from the war the moment the opportunity had presented itself.

But then he did the strangest thing. He smiled at me, and, in that smile I could see that none of the past mattered to him anymore. What had been and gone would remain that way and nothing could change it. The pain in his eyes seemed to fade as he stared, replaced with an almost happy glint. Happiness at no longer being alone, no longer dying on his own in a sterilised hospital room. That was when I began to understand. He had been expecting death for a while now, he'd been living off borrowed time since he was a child and now he was here, in this room that could quite possibly be the last room he will ever know.

I continued to watch as his breathing became even more laboured. I could almost feel the pain rolling off of him and expanding out into the room. His pale hands had begun to shake and he clenched them into the bed sheets beneath him. I stepped forward then to grasp one, hoping my eyes would portray what words could never say and he began to settle down.

Even now I don't know what overcame me, but I found myself whispering to him. Telling him how sorry I was for everything that I had ever done and asking for his forgiveness.

The last thing he ever said came out as a pained gasp and the sound of it still haunts me.

"_Draco." _That was when he took his last stuttering breath and a single drop of blood fell from the corner of his mouth and rolled down his chin before his eyes froze in an everlasting stare.

I took a while to compose myself again before calmly moving towards the door. I learnt one very important thing that day…. Death, there has never been a way to truly stop it.


End file.
